Graduate Institute of Linguistics

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The Graduate Institute of Linguistics was established in August 1994, initially offering a Master's program leading to a M.A. degree. A doctoral program began in August 2002. Graduate study in Linguistics at NTU is designed to provide students with a solid foundation in the analytical and theoretical aspects of Linguistics, especially in Cognitive Linguistics. Cognitive Linguistics, Austronesian Linguistics, Discourse Analysis, and Psycholinguistics constitute the major foci of research activities of our faculty.

講題:The Sound‐Symbolism Bootstrapping Hypothesis for Language Acquisition and Language Evolution
主講人:Prof. Mutsumi Imai (今井むつみ教授) Department of Environmental Information, Keio University at Shonan‐Fujisawa, Japan (日本慶應義塾大学 環境情報学部)
時 間:2014年3月3日(一)上午11:00‐12:30
地 點:台大語言所304室 (樂學館3F)
摘要: Sound symbolism is a non‐arbitrary relation between speech sounds and meanings. Contrary to the view from traditional linguistics, we review evidence that sound symbolism is one of important design features of language, affects on‐line processing of language, and most importantly, language acquisition. We propose the sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis, which claim that (1) pre‐verbal infants are sensitive to sound symbolism, by biologically endowed ability to map and integrate multi‐modal input; (2) sound symbolism helps infants to gain the referential insight for speech sounds; (3) sound symbolism helps infants and toddlers associate speech sounds and their reference and establish a lexical representation (4) Sound symbolism helps toddlers word learning by allowing them to focus on referents embedded in a complex scene, alleviating Quine's problem . For this purpose, we present evidence from a series of studies in my laboratory, including behavioral and EEG studies with infants and preschool age children, as well as fMRI study with adults. We further explore the possibility that sound symbolism is deeply related to the origin of language, drawing the parallel between ontogeny and phylogeny of language.